“We could have another War of the World”

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by Barry Thorne

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“We could have another War of the World in the making, only this time its headquarters, its focal point, will be the Middle East.” Prof Niall Ferguson. In his latest book, The War of the World, historian Niall Ferguson explains why the twentieth century was the bloodiest in modern history, and why he thinks it could happen again.

The British academic - who combines teaching at Harvard with writing best-selling works of history and making television documentaries - gave a special feature-length interview to Amsterdam Forum. He talks about the three factors (or three ‘E’s) which he thinks were responsible for war in the twentieth century: economic volatility, ethnic disintegration, and most importantly, empires in decline. Niall Ferguson thinks that today, all these factors are relevant to the Middle East. He also defended his views on modern day conflict - arguing that despite the turmoil that has engulfed Iraq since the 2003 invasion, military interventions still make sense in other parts of the world such as Sudan and Zimbabwe.

During the interview, Niall Ferguson answered a range of questions sent by visitors to this website, on topics ranging from the experience of empire in Sierra Leone, to his predictions for the future development of humanity. Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University.His published books include The House of Rothschild, Empire, and most recently, The War of the World. He writes columns articles for newspapers and magazines around the world, including Time magazine, Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, and the Netherlands’ De Volkskrant.

Extracts from the interview:

Niall Ferguson on the scale of violence in the twentieth century:

“What’s really interesting about the twentieth century is that even though the population of the world was much much larger than in any previous century, there really were enormous numbers of people killed directly as a result of organised violence … You get up in the neighbourhood of 170, 180 million all told, with more than 50 million dying in World War II alone.”

On the “prophetic” quality of H.G.Wells’ The War of the Worlds:

“There you have a wonderful science fiction work written in 1898 that clearly envisions warfare as the destruction of cities by high-powered invaders, and my conceit (if you like) is to say that it happened just as Wells predicted - but without Martians. It happened because human beings were able to turn on one another, and treat one another as aliens.”

On the paradox of progress in the twentieth century:

“The twentieth century ought to have been so much better. It’s a century of unparalleled material progress - and yet if anything this capacity for organised violence seems if anything to grow, and to become more lethal.”

On which parts of the world invite the most violence during the twentieth century:

“It turns out to be the most ethnically mixed, heterogeneous parts of the world that are the most dangerous in the twentieth century. That’s why central and eastern Europe is so interesting, because [that’s where] there’s a sort of patchwork of different ethno-linguistic groups living cheek-by-jowl in 1900. And those really are the places where the killing fields of the twentieth century are located.”

His explanation for why civilised societies can descend into savagery:

“In the pre-historic state, men were designed to regard other men, the ‘other’, with considerable suspicion and hostility… It’s quite tempting to bump off the men and steal the women. That’s essentially the primitive model for human conflict. What I try to suggest is that that model is there, submerged in human beings - particularly in men - and that what happens in the twentieth century is that when civilisation is torn away so to speak, these urges are set loose; and you see people behaving with real savagery.”

On why the outcome of the Iraq War should not discredit the idea of future military interventions:

“The great danger at the moment is that the failure of the American intervention in Iraq is discrediting the project of liberal or humanitarian intervention altogether. I think that would be a terrible non sequitur. If people said, ‘look what went wrong in Iraq - therefore we should never intervene in sovereign states again, we should leave Zimbabwe to go to hell in a handcart, we should leave Sudan…’ - that would be a fatal wrong conclusion to draw from the history of the last seven years.” “The prospect of a nuclear armed Iran should terrify everybody … But - what do you do? If you’ve played the card of pre-emption once and ended up with a complete fiasco on your hands, it’s much much harder to play it a second time, and this, I think, is the huge dilemma that currently confronts western statesmen - not least President Bush himself.”

On the prospect of another War of the World:

“It seems to me what’s happening in Iraq is very much the classic scenario where the empire [the US] loses its grip and goes down in a pretty ugly way, with insufficient forces failing to hold the line and finally running for the exit … We could have another War of the World in the making, only this time its headquarters, its focal point, will be the Middle East, rather than central and eastern Europe.”

On his fears for the future:

“If history has anything to teach us, it’s the vulnerability of processes of global integration, and the speed with which our civilisation - no matter how globalised it may seem - can revert to the really ugly side of human nature.”

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